Saturday, 28 March 2015

Well that was a crap week! Not a single brushstroke since Monday afternoon... that's what 4 days of commuting 190 miles a day will do for you :-(

But never fear, the wkend is here and im back with a vengeance haha:

I love this range, its proper awesome and full of character! The kickstarter is in full swing and just needs a few more backers to push it over to fund. The pledge to pick has to be the easy rider... yes its 270 quid but look at all the goodness you get for it:

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I backed at this level on day one and its just been getting better and better!

Also a game mat I ordered from Deep Cut Studio﻿ arrived today! I ordered this to play my games of Wasteman on and have to say its pretty cool, well worth a look for those like me that cant make terrain to save their life haha:

A little over a month ago I was contacted by a chap in Australia who had found links to some of the Dark Elves I painted up last year. He was after a mixed force of Elves to use as an End Times army in Warhammer!

It took a bit of time for everything to arrive with both of us ordering in the necessary bits for the commission to begin, but the first unit was ready to start on Monday and is now completed:

I have a few commissions on the go now including this Circle Orboros project. My client needs about a quarter of the faction painted to his existing army! He needed these additions below completed for a tournament tomorrow... Nothing like a deadline to get you motivated haha

Sentry Stone & Manikins

Shifting Stones

Wold Guardian

Woldwatchers

Moar Woldwatchers

Bradigus himself will be finished for tomorrow for sure, the rest of the project will be completed after a special commission that has come in all the way from Australia! More on that on Monday! ﻿

Monday, 9 March 2015

I'm sure many of you will have seen the amazing previews coming out of the Awaken Realms painting studio for The Edge, a Sci-Fi skirmish game they have created and is now funding on kickstarter

I love the models and wanted to know a bit more, so I put some questions to Marcin Swerkot and here is our chat:

Congrats on the success of The Edge so far, nearly £14.5k at time of writing is fantastic! ‎ How have you found the experience of going from concepts to initial sculpts to starting the campaign?

Thanks! We have been given a lot of support and trust in this Kickstarter – it really feels good to be a part of such a great community.

When it comes to the experience – well, it was not easy, that for sure. It took a lot of resources and time to get things were they are now and we are fully aware that it will get only more demanding – but at the end of the day we feel, that all the effort we are putting into this project is worth it.

Doing sculpts is not as easy as it seems – especially because of that we want to put tons of details into them and put a story behind every element. This includes lots of thought process to be done and then making sure all the details will be there after cast.

It is quite a ride sometimes and require some sleepless nights – but looking at some of our models on my desk – I have to say I never regret this time.

Coming up with a new system is a daunting task, have you found it to be more difficult than you initially thought? Balancing game mechanics to try and create something new that works ‎as well as a whole new universe is a proper labour of love!

Oh, yes. This is already very demanding, especially when you want to keep consistency and very high quality at everything you do. Thou we are at the first chapter of what we want to finally create – right now we are introducing skirmish game – but we want to end up as a full right miniature wargame. This means constant development and balancing and we are fully prepared to do that.

As for the universe – this is something we always wanted to do. Create a new compelling world full of stories and heroes. Being honest – I though it will be easier, heh. But again, even if it will take more effort, we are very happy to do our own thing from scratch rather than base it on already established franchise.

Many people have heard of Awaken Realms the painting studio‎ through all the fine works you guys produce. Can you tell us a bit more about how you all started working together?

Thanks for the nice words about our work ; )

We started Awaken Realms with Adrian (you may know him as Medows) and he is actually behind all of those awesome paintjobs you can see from time to time. We both finished business colleague and we decided that it will be really nice idea to combine our hobby and standards that you can see in bigger companies operating at very professional level. Thou thoughts about The Edge were at the back of our heads for a pretty long time and being finally able to get it out in public is great!

What prompted you to start on a skirmish system? ‎How have your hobby backgrounds influenced your ideas?

We figured, that doing the skirmish system right now will be a good start and a test if people will follow our vision as well as perfect game rule and make a good start for The Edge universe. But we intend to make it in a way, that once we will evolve into full right miniature war game, people will be able to use the miniatures from skirmish in normal gameplay.

As for our hobby background – we were very heavily influenced by several board games and Magic: the Gathering. What we really love is fast and intuitive game flow that gives a lot of turn the tide moments. We wanted to make a game that you could explain in 15minutes and then learn the rest on the go.

Our biggest priority in the game-flow is that it will be really intense and there will be no moments like watching your opponent doing his turn for 15 minutes.

On The Edge itself, how many models to you envisage a typical game to use? And how big a board will we need to play it on?

If you will be playing with 2 starter sets there will be 10 models on the Chapter side and 8 at Demons (they will be properly balanced obviously). All in all the table should be around 4’x4’, as one of the very important game mechanics will be gathering crystals and strategic approach to where you will move your units. More crystals you will have – more thing you will be able to do each turn, so they presence will have really huge importance on how you will play.

This way we also want to keep each game rather unique and different from each other.

As I mentioned before, the models are beautiful, some like the Angel and the Demon Goddess are huge! Truly challenging projects for dedicated painters across the world. Have you had any problems melding such a wide range of base sizes to the same mechanics (30mm to 120mm)?

Right now we did not occur any problems, as the game dimension is rather small (8-10 miniatures on each side).

Above is the art for the Mechanical Golem, the Chapter factions centerpiece model that will feature in a future stretch goal!

We have seen some of the third faction, The Faceless, do you plan on adding more forces for variety down the line? And will we see vehicles added?

Oh, yes. We will be doing more factions – we already started some concept thinking on the forth. I cannot share with you anything more than a name at this point, but I can promise that it will be really awesome. Fourth faction will be called Reborn.

Many thanks for your time Marcin, any chance for a cheeky concept to reveal to backers and blog readers?

Thanks for really great talk!

Right now we will keep the fourth faction to ourselves, lets first get Faceless running ; )

Saturday, 7 March 2015

This is a £55 pledge level including two faction starters, rulebook, cards and tokens and the brilliant Radical Trevor haha. I think im in for the Bandits and the Lunar Coalition as shown below... but it could change as butterfly and magpie mode kicks in!

Time is also right to show off my completed Swyn Glory Hog and his piggy friend, so easy to paint yet full of detail and character, im really looking forward to getting more of the range :-D﻿